We’ve grown a garden of some sort on the same patch of dirt for 30 years. And depending on what else was going on in our lives, that garden has been somewhere between lovingly planted and cared for, and hastily thrown in and walked away from. I make no excuses and have no regrets.
Joan and I bought this house on Waterloo Road in 1979, with a little help from my parents. We were 30 years old. I had a job starting a public radio station in New Hampshire, but we couldn’t come up with the $10,000 down payment on the $35,000 asking price. Yeah, in those days the banks wanted to see quite a bit of your money upfront.
The house was the original Waterloo train station, but was moved around 1910 and now sits on one corner of a flat acre of land with good southern exposure. In a photo of the place taken sometime after the Civil War, the land seems to be in use as a hay field or small pasture. In any case, one of the first things we discovered about our newly purchased acre was an old garden space lying fallow under weeds and sumac saplings. We rented a rototiller and chewed up a patch about 30 by 50 feet. The dirt seemed pretty good; about 8 inches lying on a deep bed of bright orange glacial sand which had been pushed down from Canada by the mile-high glacier that covered New England 15,000 years ago.
We planted that spring, and each of the 30 springs that have followed. We’ve grown tomatoes, cabbages, broccoli, carrots, greens, squash, cucumbers, peas, string beans, radishes and from time to time more adventurous vegetables with random success and failure. The fava beans, catalope, watermelon and peppers never worked. About 5 years ago a type of very tasty winter squash began to show up as a volunteer from our compost pile, much to the delight of the local groundhog who usually eats the crop quicker than we can harvest it.
We’ve never fertilized the garden with anything but compost and manure, and we’ve never tested the soil. Some years we’ve lucked out, and other years have been pretty sparse. This year, however, we’ve decided to get really serious. We are in the grip of the possibly foolish ambition to see how much food we can actually grow on this little plot, if we do things as right as we can. So we are enlisting the advice of the several professional growers in Warner.
And the advice they give us is to start thinking about our dirt as soil. And test that soil. So we picked one of the several labs recommended by our friends, International Ag Labs in Minnesota, and sent them off a little bag of dirt and a check for $50. They’ll send us back an analysis and a list of what we need to do to make a healthier soil out of our dirt.